Use OpenDNS To Protect Your Business Network

If you aren't using OpenDNS to protect your small business network, now is the time to take the few minutes to set it up. It is well worth the investment, it is free, and it will protect you from any number of issues in the future. And you might get better browsing performance as a result that your users will thank you for.

Before I tell you how to do this, let's have a brief explanation of what the Domain Name System is for those of you that really want to know. Think of what a phone book does -- it allows you if you know someone's name to look up their phone number. The DNS does something similar, except for computers: if you type in "google.com" it translates that name into a sequence of four numbers, called an IP address, which in this case for google.com is 72.14.207.99.

The overall Internet infrastructure has a series of master phone books, or DNS root servers, located at strategic places around the world and maintained by a collection of public, semi-public, and private providers. They talk to each other on a regular basis; to make sure that as we add new domains they are in synch. As you can imagine, if someone wants to "poison" one of the entries, or misdirect Internet traffic to a phony domain, it can be done with the right amount of subterfuge. This is what happened last year ago when an Internet provider in Pakistan managed to block access to all of YouTube when they were just trying to keep Pakistani citizens from viewing a single offensive video.

Here is where OpenDNS comes into play. When you set up your network, typically you don't give your DNS settings any further thought. If you have a cable or DSL modem, you hook it up and it automatically gets its DNS settings from the cable or phone company's DNS servers.

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